By MEGHAN QUINN
Guest Columnist
Editor’s note: Scott Saalman is spending the week trying to find himself. He recommends that you read a better writer, Meghan Quinn, who lives in Indianapolis. You porch lovers will appreciate this piece.
When my family returned to the Midwest from Los Angeles, Calif., in 1984, I was only three years old. We moved into my mom’s family’s summer cabin at Lake Lawrence in Illinois, where I would grow up. We had a huge outdoor patio and a screened-in front porch. These spaces were my favorite places, the places where I was safe, in our yard, but free outdoors to run and play and jump and be a kid.
There, I learned to ride a bicycle, steer a Roller Racer, drive a Cozy Coupe Little Tykes car, master the roller-skates, and where I learned the importance of NOT pogo-balling on a picnic table.
It was where my sister and I spent countless hours drying off in swimsuits and playing with the neighbor kids. It was the first place I ever cupped my hands and held a wild animal, a little black and yellow salamander. It was where I waited anxiously while my dad baited my homemade fishing pole in the evenings to take me fishing down at the dock. It was where I learned to gently catch lightning bugs and set them free, and it was where I roamed and explored the world, fell and scraped my knees and elbows, and learned the art of getting back up and moving on.
The porch was where I accidentally opened the door of the cage of our family’s beloved Yellow Headed Amazon parrot, Percy, and watched in astonishment as he took flight and sailed over the roof of our house, out over the lake, eventually coming to rest on the surface of the water at the sandbar about thirty yards out from our dock. And I stood and watched from that patio as my mom raced down the steps to the beach, kicked off her shoes, dove straight into the water with all her clothes on, and swam as fast as she could to retrieve the grumpy bird.
It is where we said goodbye to our old mutt “We-Dog” after she passed away, and where we witnessed the incredible birth of our cat Julie’s kittens, where we cradled them in our arms and marveled at their cuteness together in the days ahead.
It never occurred to me that part of the reason this outdoor space played such a huge role in our lives was because we did not have air conditioning (and wouldn’t for several years) and that we owned a television set but rarely ever sat down to watch it, mostly because at that time cable was not yet available at Lake Lawrence, and in order to get any channels to come in, someone often had to stand just-so and hold the “rabbit ear” antennae at just exactly the right angle in order for us to get a clear picture. I just knew it was our family’s space, where we carried on the business of being a family together.
As I sat down and began writing this piece, I Googled “porch sitting” out of curiosity. I was surprised at the results.
I had no idea that houses in Florida were required to have front porches at one point in time, before the invention of air conditioning, as an area where families could gather to cool off and socialize with the neighbors. As these became popular staples in neighborhoods, more people across the country began building them on their homes. In the evenings, families would sit together and visit with neighbors. It added an element of, not only socialization, but also security to a neighborhood, as it was proven to lower crime rates, with porch sitters serving as a line of defense, sets of eyes and ears all over the neighborhood, keeping their thumbs on the pulse of their communities.
When the pandemic arrived in March of 2020 in our little sleepy town, I longed for warm weather and sunny days. And as those arrived, my family, without even meaning to, moved our activities out onto the porch of the giant American four-square house where we currently live in Old Town, Vincennes. We do have air conditioning and television now, but there was something about being able to go outside, the chance encounters with neighbors on morning, afternoon, evening walks – the opportunity to socialize safely, from a distance, but still able to make those important human connections, to remind ourselves that we are all in this together, no matter how far apart we have to stand.
My daughter and her friends had socially distanced porch parties, during which they had Bobe’s delivered to the front steps and watched movies together spread across the porch. We visited with our parents on the porch, in lawn chairs and old-fashioned wooden rockers. We ate dinners on the porch.
We orchestrated our daughter Taylor’s high school graduation ceremony and “open house” from the safety of that porch. We held a small, intimate, going-away party for our beloved Japanese exchange student, Miyu, on that porch.
I taught internet college courses, read books, and occasionally took naps on the porch. I kept an eye on the neighborhood, learned more about the world there, and as a result, I was reminded of the myriad reasons I love porches.
Currently, my family is renting a house in Indianapolis, and here, too, we have a porch. I long for warmer weather and sunshine, for the chance to sit on that porch and hear the neighborhood kids playing, watching the sunlight change subtly as the day moves forward. I long to sit on that porch with a cold glass of ice water waiting on the evening cicadas to begin their song and transport me back to that porch of my childhood, back to Lake Lawrence, back to the simplicity and beauty of learning how to navigate the world from the safety of a porch.
You can contact Meghan Quinn at meghanontheporch@gmail.com. Visit her website, pardontheporch.com.